Lingokids, an English language learning platform for early childhood, has raised $6 million in a series A round of funding led by HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, with participation from existing investors JME Venture Capital, Sabadell Ventures, Big Sur Ventures and Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO of SpaceX.
New investors including Silicon Valley ed-tech investor Reach Capital, Athos Capital, and All Iron Ventures also participated in this round. The company has so far raised $11 million.
The subscription-based platform teaches English to children of age 2 to 8 through a series of activities, games, and songs that adapt in difficulty to each child’s level allowing for a fun and personalized learning experience.
Launched in 2016, Lingokids now has more than seven million families registered across more than 180 countries and has been growing at a rate of 300% each year. India is a key market with the highest number of registered users (400000) and a 5x growth in downloads from 2016 to 2017. Traction comes mainly from Maharashtra, Delhi and Karnataka regions which account for 40% of users in India,
“There is a growing interest in English language learning in early childhood, with market figures suggesting that at least 500 million children under the age of 8 will be learning English by 2020,” explains Cristobal Viedma, Lingokids founder and CEO.
The raised capital will go towards three main purposes: accelerating growth, acquiring new talent, and developing new features for the app. Lingokids plans to offer an even more personalized experience for students and to increase parental involvement in the learning process, two key factors when it comes to providing quality education during early childhood.
Improvements include a revamping of the app’s parents’ section, providing new types of interactive content formats, and offering speech recognition features. The platform also aims to double its original content offering to more than 2,000 learning activities by the end of 2019.
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